


An Offer in the Form

by charlottechill



Category: Almost Human
Genre: Canon Related, Episode Related, M/M, Pre-Slash, Slash, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-10
Updated: 2015-03-10
Packaged: 2018-03-18 17:51:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3578493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charlottechill/pseuds/charlottechill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Kennex has a new partner who's far from perfect but not so far from human... maybe more human than the people around him. What the hell is he supposed to do with that?</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Offer in the Form

**Author's Note:**

  * For [killabeez](https://archiveofourown.org/users/killabeez/gifts), [starandrea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starandrea/gifts), [megankent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/megankent/gifts).



The Beginning

In Fox’s world of arbitrary episode order, I might have taken liberties. _You Are Here_ made much more sense earlier in the series timeline than Fox aired it. But I had also anchored _Are You Receiving_ and _Skin_ pretty early in the show as well. This story makes clear the order in which I used early episodes; I hope you’ll indulge me at least as much as you indulged FOX.

#

He feels eyes on him when he walks through the station, sees the hostile looks, and understands. He’s the guy who let someone get too close, infiltrate him. He’s the guy who got everyone, every single cop he led into that raid two years ago, killed. He’d hate John Kennex too, if he were on the outside looking in.

Still, he resists the temptation to go back and force his black-market recollectionist to zap his brain some more only because Dorian said he’d report it if John does. Apparently John can’t afford to wind up “dead or with fewer brain cells that, man, you really can’t afford to lose.” Dorian also promises to tell him when John might be able to safely endure the procedure.

_Safely endure the procedure._ John has the impression that Dorian’s opinion isn’t gonna be as stringent as the licensed doctors who told John “no” before a black-market doctor started sounding like a good idea. John has no idea about the details of Dorian’s core hardware technology, but the DRN can’t be as human as he acts, or he would know why seeing a recollectionist now is worth the risk.

As they drive the streets, John looks sidelong at Dorian, who for once isn’t making idle conversation. John’s reasoning isn’t completely fair; Sandra wouldn’t say it’s worth the risk, either, and she’s human even if she is his captain. She should understand why he needs to find Anna. Richard Paul would say it’s worth the risk, since it’s only John’s brain they’re talking about… so a DRN is more human than Richard? John laughs under his breath.

“Something funny, John?”

“Yeah,” John says. He doesn’t elaborate. No way is he going to suggest that Dorian is better at anything than any human being is. He suspects the DRN already thinks that’s true, but he does a pretty good job hiding his opinion. Seconds tick by until a minute or more passes.

“And you’re not going to share.”

“No.”

“I’m gonna go out on a limb here,” Dorian says, “and guess that I’m not the only person who knows you’re a huge pain in the ass.”

“You’re not a person.”

“Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning,” Dorian says, and settles deeper into the passenger seat. He doesn’t sound angry. He hasn’t sounded angry since their confrontation in the precinct office, and John still doesn’t know if that was a bug or a robot “emotion” or a programming strategy designed to convince him of something.

John doesn’t even grunt. For the most part, Dorian has acted like a model partner, but “acted like” are the key words. John has seen plenty of synthetics with the processing capacity to respond halfway realistically to human behavior: household droids, personal service bots. Old-age companions. Other androids in the DR series.

He’s not falling for the mimicry. But riding with a DRN means he doesn’t have to deal with an MX, so he’ll take it.

#

At home, John pulls out a celo and drags his finger across the top, opaquing the sheet. He uses his finger to write, the fast, almost unique-to-him graffiti that computers have learned from him over the years. He hates voice recorders and refuses to commit this to video.

_Loyalty. It seems like that’s something Dorian gets, or fakes pretty goddamned well. It’s the best thing about the DRN. This model of android isn’t compelled to file a report whenever a rule gets broken, and its programming seems adapted to the idea of greater rights and lesser wrongs. That sure as hell isn’t something an MX would be able to process._

_He told me he has free will. I don’t believe that androids can have free will._

_I don’t even know if people have free will. I’ve got a seventeen-month hole in my memory, a synthetic leg that doesn’t like me, and a DRN android for a partner. I’ve got a couple of months of rehab and the kind of pain I can’t forget. I wouldn’t have chosen any of those things. But if I was back in that alley two years ago with Pelham, and knew how it would go down, I’d have done the same thing. You don’t just walk away and leave your partner to die._

_Is that free will? Doesn’t feel like it._

_I keep waiting to run into the DRN machine code. I don’t mean the slip-ups or the ignorance that comes because he hasn’t lived a real life, like telling me I’m “malfunctioning,” or the calculations it can make because of the processing power of the chips in its net. I’m waiting for the artificial. The—the synthetic._

_Lock. Kennex, John. Birthdate January 14, 2007_

* * *

#

They’ve only served six shifts together, and it’s already too easy to forget.

John keeps attending his mandatory anger management classes, and he did his mandatory follow-up with Dr. Tilden, the department’s shrink. He keeps running his investigation on the side. It’s not like he’s sleeping, much.

Maybe he’s projecting or something, because Dorian seems to hate MXs. And the MXs aren’t too keen on Dorian, either. John can’t help but love that.

Still, he shouldn’t have shot Richard’s MX today. He knew as soon as he did it, before the ’bot hit the concrete or Richard’s curses stopped echoing off the subway station walls. He’d sure as hell known before they were standing in the captain’s office and Sandra started yelling.

But mostly, he knows when Richard threatens Dorian in Captain Maldonado’s office, and John almost takes the guy’s head off right there in front of her. Still, he has to make his point. “You can dress these machines to look like cops. You can program them to drive a car and shoot a gun like a cop,” he says to the captain. “But they’re not cops. They’re bullet catchers.”

Sandra dismisses Richard, lets John charm his way out of hot water, and sends him out to interview the victim’s girlfriend.

He collects his android with a nod and things seem as normal as his life gets these days, until they’re in the squad car. Then Dorian starts smirking at him from the passenger seat and won’t stop. Won’t _blink_.

“What.” John tries to say it like it’s not a question.

“You like me.”

“Sorry?”

“You like me,” Dorian repeats. He looks way too happy for a pile of silicon and carbon fiber.

“No I don’t.”

“Yes, you do.” Dorian’s tone brooks no argument. He sounds certain, like he’d swear to it in a court of law—if the opinion of a synthetic were legal testimony.

“No.”

“You definitely do.”

“How do you come by that conclusion?”

“The MX. You shot it because it insulted me. You like me.”

“No, I shot the MX because it wouldn’t shut up.” John would swear to _that_ in a court of law.

“Nope. You shot it because you like me.”

“Keep talking, I’ll prove my point.”

“It’s okay, John,” Dorian says, and smiles. “I like you, too.”

There’s no way to win. Dorian just says things like that, and John wishes that whoever designed DRNs had put in a little less chat and a little more circumspection. He doesn’t _mind_ the android, and maybe Dorian’s even growing on him a little. But he’s not gonna admit he likes him. Besides, Dorian doesn’t act like he needs John to agree, anyway.

He wonders if Dorian would like the term “bullet catcher” more or less than “synthetic.” It’s a more accurate description of an MX’s function, John supposes, but not necessarily of Dorian’s. He opens his mouth to try it out when Rudy calls from the lab with information on the bullet that killed their vic, Anton Cross. It’s less a bullet and more a miniature guided missile. Great.

They get to the girlfriend, Kira Larsen, and Dorian stumbles over the vic’s involvement in the black-market tech that was the bullet’s guidance system. John resists the urge to say, “Good work,” or something he might have said to a human junior partner. Dorian isn’t a partner. Dorian’s a way to avoid MXs. On the drive back to the station, John gets a brief history of Cross’s tracking technology, most of which he doesn’t understand, but if he repeats bits in a meeting he’ll probably sound like a genius. Maybe part of a DRN’s programming is to make its human look good.

Back at the station, Valerie looks for a money trail and Richard pokes at Dorian a little. Richard isn’t nasty, but John figures it’s his own fault for shooting Richard’s MX, so he asks Dorian for direct support, after. He even asks nicely. “Anton’s girlfriend said he’d been meeting a headhunter from a company called Kinsey,” he says, after he catches Dorian’s eye. “All we have is a first name. Can you check it out?”

Cold blue lights race down synapses. John’s going to ask Rudy why that circuitry is placed in the dermal layer. Seems like it’s vulnerable, there. Dorian says, “There are no Natalies currently employed by Kinsey.”

John thinks. “Maybe Kira got the name wrong.”

He wants to let Dorian do the detecting, but it’s Valerie who says, “Or maybe she’s lying.”

John didn’t get that feeling off Larsen. He thinks she’s just a shell-shocked girlfriend whose boyfriend got dead. But John slept with the enemy for almost a year, and didn’t even know. He’ll take a second opinion.

He’ll even wait to let Dorian say, “Let’s go ask her.”

He turns to go when he sees Sandra Maldonado in a precinct interrogation cube with that InSyndicate dirtbag, Reinhart. Why did she let him out of his cell at the Cubes? “Hang on,” he says to Dorian, and takes off after her.

He can’t believe she’s willing to offer Reinhart a deal, not after the asshole led an assault on this very precinct. He can’t believe she’d have offered him a deal before that assault, when all she knew was that he’d been at the site of the InSyndicate raid that killed most of John’s strike team two years ago, including Martin Pelham, John’s real, human partner.

He doesn’t believe whatever information Reinhart has is worth letting him walk. He can’t believe it, or he’ll be back at the recollectionist tonight, forcing the guy to scramble his brain until he either remembers everything, or he can’t remember his own name. But it eats at him, like a rat he can hear behind the decayed walls of his lost memory, scurrying, scratching, causing damage he can’t see and can’t fix.

Dorian waits in the bullpen where John told him to wait, watches him approach. “John?” Dorian asks as John walks by and waves him along. “You okay?”

Dorian must have run a bioscan on him. Police androids have the tech to collect data available to any public filtration device, and the legal authority to look deeper, in all kinds of circumstances. So Dorian must have a full biological report, including any hormone associated with rage that John happens to excrete through his lungs, mouth, or skin.

He stops and turns on Dorian. He’s got to figure this out. “Why?”

Dorian glances around, steps a little closer, and lowers his voice. “I saw… who distracted you. I know it’s hard, man.”

_How? How could you know anything like that?_ John doesn’t ask. He’s got some homework to do, but later. He shakes his head instead. “Lets get moving. Locate Kira Larsen for me.”

Dorian’s eyes focus on the middle distance as they walk, but he doesn’t miss a step. “She is on foot, a few blocks away from her place of work at Trope Consulting. She usually buys lunch from a vendor in the open market on Sixteenth and Haley.”

John nods, and drives.

Twenty minutes later, they stand in the sun of the open market, re-interviewing her. John is surer that she’s telling the truth, that she’s ignorant of the wet work her boyfriend got himself into, but they get a better description of Anton Cross’s headhunter before another guided bullet hits too close to home. John stumbles back a few paces, shoved away by his DRN. So was Kira Larsen. Dorian’s down.

John reaches out and touches Dorian’s shoulder, forgetting again that it’s an android, but the shocked frown that looks like, and can’t be, pain reminds him, and he lets go. “You okay?” he asks.

Tracer lights flash under his skin, and John guesses it’s diagnostics being run.

Dorian says something in some Asian language. Then he glances at disgusting purple goo on his fingers and smiles up at John, full voltage, like he’s posing for a public relations poster.

Who puts an android’s language translation system in its abdominal cavity? _Behind the chest plate_ , John thinks, before he can say something stupid. Protected under the armor. He’d thought the size of the high-caliber bullet was mostly to house the tracking gear, but the projectile was heavy enough to spin two or three hundred pounds of android to the ground _and_ poke a hole through police-grade tactical housing.

“I’ll call it in,” he says. “Who was the target? Her, or me?”

Dorian says what might be, “Chong-a-ri go nyeo hae-do—” enough for John to identify Korean—before John holds his hand out to shut him up.

“Stop,” John orders. “Just—point. Me?” He hooks his thumb at his chest. “Or her?” He points toward Kira Larsen, who ran a good twenty feet away. She’s smart.

Dorian frowns like John’s the one speaking gibberish, then points to Larsen.

“Great.” He holds out a hand to lever Dorian up, and wishes he hadn’t when the goo gets onto his palm. It’s sticky. And it’s… warm. He pushes Dorian toward her, covertly wiping his hand on the back of the android’s police jacket. With that bullet hole, it’ll get recycled and replaced, anyway. “Stick close to her and keep an eye out for incoming until I can get reinforcements here. If they tried once, they can try again. Do _not_ talk to her. Do not say anything. Got it?”

Still frowning, Dorian nods and walks over, stops three feet away and turns his back to her. John calls it in while he watches Dorian on sentry, watches Dorian’s eyes track from traffic scanners to ATMs and automatic food servers, from secured doors to payment scanners to public transit access gates. John’s used to a world where everybody knows where he is unless he makes a hell of an effort to hide. The fact that unless they stop these people, all of those cameras and scanners are one big guidance system that can paint a target on his back makes his skin itch more than usual.

Backup arrives, Larsen is placed in a blacked-out, secure vehicle, and a guy from Android Tech scans Dorian. Dorian is cleared, and he looks fine. John asks anyway. “How are your functions? You okay to continue?”

He hopes whatever Dorian says means, “Yeah man, my functions are great, I’m good to go,” because he’s got to get Kira Larsen to accept protective custody and figure out what she knows that’s so important, these people are willing to kill her for it. If Dorian can’t function under pressure, he really can’t do this job.

She accepts protection until they get her to a secure, underground facility. Then all of a sudden she’s ready to have Anton Cross scrubbed out of her memory. The plan is naïve, at best. And it might piss John off a little that she’s willing, on impulse, to have memories removed when all he wants is to recover memories he can’t get at.

He concentrates on witness/victim interaction and tries to convince her. Scrubbing won’t make a difference. These people have already marked her for death. She doesn’t look convinced, but there’s nothing else he can do right now.

Eight hours later, after she’s escaped to implement her stupid plan and nearly got them both killed, John’s ears are ringing from machine-gun fire. His pulse is racing and he’s sweating. It’s hard not to pant under the demands adrenaline and fear forced onto him, fight-or-flight, but now there’s nobody to fight and no reason to run. The hallway feels flooded with other cops, and since he fired his weapon and killed someone, their MXs are free to analyze his blood chemistry to file with their reports.

He looks over and decides Dorian can definitely do this job. Dorian might have feelings, but he looks calm right now. Inhumanly calm. Dorian doesn’t sweat and didn’t hesitate when John asked him to draw the shooters’ fire. Dorian just makes decisions, like the one to step in front of a machine gun so John could duck out and get a kill shot. John’s not as sure about Dorian’s decision to fire strategically on the blonde rather than put her down. In John’s opinion, sometimes it’s better just to exterminate vermin.

He holsters his weapon. “Well, you took your fair share today,” he says.

Dorian doesn’t quite smile. “I’ll send you the bill.” His tone of voice is—John doesn’t know what it is. It’s a new tone, a little like the familiar humor, but a little like Dorian’s trying to tell him a secret in this smoke-filled, crowded hallway. Does Dorian know what he meant? If so, how? What technology overheard the exchange in Sandra’s office that Dorian might have hijacked? John lets it go. For now.

Android Tech offers to deliver Dorian to Rudy’s lab for inspection, but John waves them off. “I’ll do it,” he says, because he needs to know something. In the car, he asks. “The woman you shot. You put five into her, perfect incapacitation shots. Why didn’t you just kill her, to be sure?”

“I was between you and her,” Dorian replies. “And she might have information INTERPOL can use, to locate the group who stole the weapons from the Ukraine.”

John’s neck feels tacky with dried sweat. He wonders how to say what he wants to say without making Dorian want to report him. “There’s no gray area here,” he says. “She was actively firing on a police officer and her intended victim. Sometimes, it’s better not to take risks.”

“You’re saying you’d be happier if I’d murdered her.”

John glares at him. “That’s not murder.”

“At my processing speed?” Dorian shrugs, and John sees that too-common smile, “it’s pretty close to premeditation. The fact that I’m a law enforcement officer might make it a gray area.” He pauses. “Do you think that’s a gray area, John? Legally speaking, I mean? Or morally?” 

John scratches his hair and frowns. “Shut up.”

Dorian does, and John drops him off without another word. Rudy will do whatever, and have him sent back to the charging bay.

At home, John floats a virtual screen over to his treadmill, strips down to his shorts, and climbs on. It’s a little easier to walk and run every day, a little more natural. His leg still hurts but he’s trying to work with it, stop fighting it. He’s trying because he promised Sandra he would, and he doesn’t want to be the weak link in the chain again. Ever.

He gets the pace up to four miles an hour on variable incline now, before his brain has to tell his leg how to walk, to actively think about what it takes to make the limb bend at the knee, contract and release artificial muscle, transfer his weight from fake heel to fake toe. He drops the pace until he doesn’t have to think, like the physical therapists told him to. Three-point-eight. That’s still good, better than when he started back to work.

Then he logs into the department system by remote, and opens DRN-0167’s service record. Even with heavy redaction, there’s enough for him to learn things. Dorian had almost five years on the line before he was decommissioned, which means he arrived in one of the first two waves of DRNs into service. Which means the integrity of his—chassis, skeleton, whatever they call them these days—is more solid than the bots that came after him, once his model impressed all the higher-ups with the beatings it could take. Dorian has seventeen cleared kills on his sheet, eighty-four injuries, five-hundred-and-nine discharges of a weapon in live-fire conditions, and zero questionable finds on investigation. He had two different partners over his initial term, but the record doesn’t state who the partners were, and the redaction includes all seventeen kills, so John can’t guess.

Maybe John was wrong about DRNs. Maybe this one’s okay.

He asks questions about the morality of choosing kill shots over incapacitation, like he really wants to learn.

Shit. Maybe Dorian is crazy.

He still isn’t a person.

John turns off the treadmill and walks to his desk, picks up the celo he’s using to write his journal, the one Tilden told him to write and swore to him he’d never be required to turn over as evidence, for any reason, even under threat of termination or during the execution of a warrant. The journal is supposed to be about his insomnia, his flashbacks, his weird dreams, and the stuff that triggers problems for him. There isn’t enough money in the world to make him think about that stuff on his free time. That’s what whiskey’s for.

_I called androids bullet catchers, yesterday. I meant MXs, but Dorian took seven direct hits on this case. Only one had the mass and velocity to punch through his tactical armor, but he stepped in front of it without hesitation._

_I’d have done the same for Pelham, maybe for any real cop, if I was in heavy tac gear. I wonder if Dorian knows whether or not he can be damaged, before he makes decisions. I wonder if they’re decisions at all. I should talk to Rudy, but I don’t know if I’d understand what he told me._

_It’s not important._

_Lock. Kennex, John. Birthdate January 14, 2007_

He’s got hours before he’ll sleep, and after seventeen months in a coma, a ruined reputation on the Force, and an admittedly bad attitude when he woke up, he can count the people he might call on one hand. He doesn’t want to talk to anybody, anyway.

He goes back to the treadmill. Biomech isn’t the natural process all the biotech people like to pitch it as. He sets a slow pace, under three miles an hour that after seventeen months asleep, still makes him sweat.

He logs into the police database and codes his research to private, calls up records on the law enforcement synthetics program. No cop’s research is really private, but the machines and John’s peers won’t be allowed in, this way. If Sandra checks up on him, she’ll probably wonder why he waited this long to start investigating.

Just in case Dr. Tilden pokes around, John calls up the statistics on his leg too, but he minimizes the window because he still hates it and it clearly still hates him. Just the thought makes him stumble, and he has to pause the treadmill for a second.

Some of this stuff, he remembers because of the media coverage: Nigel Vaughn’s “technological breakthrough” in 2027, the Synthetic Soul that John’s mother had believed at the time was nothing more than a catchy product label. Bi-pedal synthetics had been around since the early ’20s, but their applications changed when Vaughn opened LumoCorp for big-time business.

LumoCorp hadn’t wasted much time on private-sector products. Its police pilot line—DRAs—had shown up in John’s precinct over 15 years ago, back in 2032. Uniformed cops, they’d been designed to appear female, a little bulky, and not so human that they distracted men or annoyed women. He hears his mother’s voice in his head, droll and amused as she predicted the future: _they’ll present feminine models first, something to lure the lizard brain of male decision makers. I’ll bet you your allowance money, dear, that they’ll be blonde_.

She said that back when he was a junior in high school, and she’d been wrong about the blonde hair but her reasoning held. Looking back on it, John wonders how much planning went into that bot’s appearance, LumoCorp’s luring in of humanity; the DRAs, while they looked a lot more like machines then than Dorian or even MXs do, had been designed to entice a human population, just like his mother meant.

His leg really does hate him. It’s not the other way around, no matter what Tilden says, because his hip feels like it’s on fire, and the implanted socket burns.

He turns off the treadmill and floats the monitor back to his desk. He’s got more to worry about than a synthetic leg or battle scars or an android partner, as long as it’s not an MX like the model that left him and Pelham to die.

He needs to find Anna, his rat fake girlfriend who made him a pawn in her criminal game.

He waves his hand to wake up the case board he’s been building since he woke up and a nurse told him what day—what month, what year—it was. He kept it in his head, in the hospital. Now he keeps the case board on his desk, his displays, on post-its archived all around the house. The board is littered with too many questions, like pieces from a hundred different jigsaw puzzles and he doesn’t even know how to sort them into the right piles. He just knows they’re important, and that somewhere there’s a key—maybe inside his head, maybe inside his house.

He glances over his shoulder at the open floor space, but he doesn’t move. He wasted too many hours and too much pain wandering around it. Anyway, the house was scanned and sealed after he got blown half apart and his brain shut down on him. His mother’s word and her skills are reliable as hell, and she says no one overrode the house security, that the police seal was broken only by Sandra Maldonado. Sandra had come in a week after the failed police raid, to empty his refrigerator and clean out his porn collection for him. They have a deal that goes back years, and a friendship that reaches beyond rank. He’s got the codes to her place too, and he knows what skeletons he’s supposed to clear out if, God forbid, she’s ever the one down.

When he checks the time, he’s shocked to find that three hours have slipped by and it’s dark outside. The house adjusted so incrementally, he hadn’t noticed. He wonders if he had some sort of brain seizure, but he doesn’t remember any flashbacks, and he’s still standing. Even his synthetic leg feels solid.

Tilden would say he spends too much time zoning out in front of pictures of crime scenes and corpses. John might agree. He waves off the overlays and turns on some music, pours a drink to dull the pain at the top of his thigh, where the leg hub was implanted. He needs to get some sleep.

#

A week doesn’t pass before they catch a case where somebody committed murder with an artificial heart. It’s a break from John’s off-the-books investigation, which is going in such tight circles he’s wearing new grooves into his brain. The case is urgent. It’s important.

Dorian mucks it up.

One DRN can be annoying as hell. Two lead down the road to crazy-town, but they remind John that whatever Dorian is or isn’t, his programming lets him think he can want things. Dorian wants to be a cop; he wants to annoy John; he wants to know all kinds of personal things John isn’t going to tell him; he wants to help another android. John talks to him like a real person now, acknowledging not just that he’s different from MXs, but that riding with Dorian means he can’t avoid dealing with those wants.

Five more people die before John can trace the extortion ring back to the mortician they started out with. After they get the artificial heart manufacturer to fix the problems it caused for the victims of the blackmail ring, John sends Dorian to the charging bay and goes back to the precinct office to make his report. It bothers him that Dorian was able to restore and remove memory from the DRN he dragged for a ride-along. It bothers him that stored memory can just be stripped away like that, and that androids can do that to each other, with tech, like humans try to do it to themselves with booze and drugs and memory scrubbers.

This might be another place where Dorian acts kind-of human, though, understands greater rights and lesser wrongs. Leaving that DRN with memories of what it wanted and couldn’t have would have been cruel. On the other hand, what’s a personality that isn’t based on experience and memory?

Another MX got junked on this case anyway. Those things just don’t seem built to last.

John finishes his case summary and files his bi-weekly report on Dorian, checking the boxes about his behavior and field performance. Dorian was good in the field, in spite of the little ride-along robot rebellion. They brought down the organ blackmail ring with only two shots fired; it was solid detective work.

John wonders why he doesn’t report Dorian for being the root cause of the damage to a drone and the third MX on John’s watch. Maybe it’s because Dorian didn’t report him for beating on that InSyndicate scum, or because Dorian wanted to “be that guy” for the other DRN. John sees something familiar, in that. It’s not like he can miss it, since Dorian spelled it out.

He walks all the way to Rudy’s lab, bypassing vehicles and pedestrian slides. He can justify skipping the treadmill, for this, and it’s time to find out if Dorian has any privacy at all, or if covering for an android just exposes John to termination at his next performance review.

As usual, Rudy’s up to his elbows in artificial body parts. The guy really, really needs to get out more. “Rudy!”

Rudy looks up, looks happy. “John!” Then he looks behind John and frowns. “Where’s Dorian?”

John pokes a bony shoulder on his way to a chair. “That’s your problem. You’re more excited to see an android than you are a human.”

Rudy tries not to look embarrassed, says, “Only some androids—and only some humans.”

John smirks. He knows Rudy envies him. “Dorian made friends with a DRN tasked as a technician or something in a hospital.” John waves a hand. “This case we closed today. Anyway, he gave it some information, and after the captain crawled up _my_ ass about it, he took the information back. Can you do that to him?”

Rudy shakes his head, looks worried. “John, I’m—I can assure you that DRNs are amazingly discreet. They needed autonomy in order to ensure both the legal privacy and the confidence of the human police officers they served with. If you interacted—no, interacted is an odd word, isn’t it?”

John figures out what Rudy isn’t saying. “He didn’t catch me jerking off, or something.” Even if Dorian had, the department has strict rules about what data uploaded from an android can even be seen by human eyes, much less stored.

Rudy nods vigorously. “Quite right. Good. Committing a crime, then? Again, unless it was at least a Class B felony, I think he’d keep mum. Can you give me some context here, so I’ll understand what—”

John squeezes the bridge of his nose. “I did not commit a felony, Rudy.” Though he kind of has. Definitely has. For a greater good. “Dorian pries. All the time. I’m not gonna answer his questions if they can be removed, and he’ll just start pestering me all over again the next day. Better to set the boundary now.”

Rudy laughs. John doesn’t see what’s so funny, even when Rudy says, “He’s designed to be curious. It’s a part of being a good detective, isn’t it?”

“You’re not answering my question.”

Rudy’s relaxed again because he turns back to his work, an arm whose hand keeps grasping at empty air. “Dorian was re-activated under police protocols. Because data he uploads may be used in the prosecution of a case, selective erasure is impossible.” He huffs out a laugh. “Can you imagine the field day a defense attorney would have with that?”

“Okay,” John says, because it’s a good point. But it brings up a more interesting question. “Why isn’t everything he sees public record? The MXs share a database.” John knows this, because they use each other’s information all the time to stalk him. He reminds himself that it’s not personal, that MXs stalk all cops.

“We can’t store it.”

John waits, but Rudy seems done. What is the matter with people? They either give him one-word answers, or dissertations on a subject. “Because…?” he says.

Rudy is focused on his—the—arm. “With the multi-layered SVLSI chips Dorian runs on…” the arm flexes at the elbow, and the hand makes a fist. “Imagine every moment, every thought, every sound, every touch, every experience you have, plus every connection you make between all of those individual events over the course of a day, then multiply that by every sensor Dorian has. That’s how much data we’re dealing with before we figure in the effects of Synthetic Soul. We’d have to use DNA storage, which as I’m sure you know is both slow and expensive. So Dorian has internal storage much like the human brain. He has to determine what data sets to upload.”

_If I report anything, it’s because I decided it needed to be reported…._

Rudy could be lying. Rudy might be socially awkward, but he’s a fucking genius, and maybe John doesn’t have clearance for this. “That’s a load of crap,” he says, testing. “I’ve seen you on his net.”

The fingers on the arm twitch. “Think of it like a telephone call, John. He opens the line, and he can close it.”

John narrows his eyes, aiming for the look he gives a suspect in the box. “You sure you’re not the one who opens and closes that line?”

There it is, the telltale swallow. Androids aren’t the only ones who can tell when somebody’s lying.

“Police bots make tens of thousands of queries a day. The ability to review data queries of a DRN is a diagnostic tool. Also, when he’s offline there are certain hardware checks I’m able to make, but if you’re asking whether or not I can read his thoughts? Tap into all his memories? No. I wish I could. I worry about him.” Rudy fiddles with something on the arm that makes the fist clench and relax.  “I worried about all of them. For all the good it did them.”

Well, crap. “Look,” John says, and clears his throat. “I’m starting to get it, maybe. He’s—” he flounders, looking for the right words, “he’s really advanced.”

Rudy nods, but he doesn’t look John’s way. “John, if there’s a problem… is he keeping something from you? Is there something you’re not saying?” He trails off. The fingers on the artificial hand freeze.

John has forgotten why he came here. “No, he’s good. I’m good. Thanks, Rudy. See you tomorrow.” He gets out of the lab before Rudy makes him feel guilty.

At home, John strips to his shorts and steps onto his treadmill. He used to love to run on it, staring out at the bay, but he’s coming to hate this machine almost as much as he hates his leg. He logs into the system, opens his coded research. He ticks up the pace on his treadmill, easing into a jog and ignoring the pain.

His leg cooperates, so he tells the computer to read the file to him.

“The sixth precinct became the first in the city to fully integrate, the DRD android model,” it says, “followed closely by the states of California and the entire Pacific West district. In the sixth precinct, six hundred DRD models replaced two thousand, one hundred and twelve uniformed human officers. Income from issuance of misdemeanor fines increased by two thousand, one-hundred-twelve percent, which exceeded the costs of charging the synthetic units.”

John remembers. Androids didn’t take weekends, didn’t need a benefits package, and most importantly didn’t die in the line of duty because they weren’t alive in the first place. LumoCorp wasn’t just great at robotics. They’d been great with money, and low-balled every municipality’s leases. Everybody won.

The computer drones on.

“Youth tagging of synthetics became a public relations concern that LumoCorp solved by revising the products’ outer membranes to more closely resemble human skin, altering the androids’ protocols to increase their freedom to maintain their hardware security, and recommending cloth uniforms that could be more easily recycled. Charging bays were expanded to include synthetic unit equipment storage and supply areas. DRDs and the subsequent DRI line exceeded performance expectations and operated at a lower-than-expected cost per unit. The overwhelming majority of human complaints stopped within one hundred days of integration.”

John remembers liking those DRIs. He hadn’t interacted with them much, but he’d been impressed that they grinned when he flashed his badge after hours, and he’d appreciated the value of keeping human cops out of the line of fire for simple stuff like traffic stops and foot patrols. They were worth the loss of manpower, because they saved lives and improved public safety.

“Stop,” he tells the computer, because so far it doesn’t seem like he has any holes in his memory. “Summarize DRN series technology, introduction, integration, performance shortfalls, and decommissioning.”

Text scrolls too fast for the eye to follow, then slows when the computer talks some more. “With the success of the DRA, DRD, and DRI series, LumoCorp focused its research and development capacity on the DRN android series,” it reads. John ups the treadmill pace a little more. “The DRNs were platformed on the Eujuneo Pendant learning module, enhanced with state-of-the-art processing cores and updated Synthetic Soul synaptic integration. Their increased processing power, coupled with changes in technology and property law, led LumoCorp to re-assert its claim that the DR series met, without reservation, all legal and ethical criteria of sentient life.”

John’s leg seizes and he grabs the handrails. Pain shoots up through his hip and into his belly. “How the hell did I not remember that?”

“Query?”

He slows the treadmill to three miles an hour. The pain keeps flaring. “Continue.”

“DRN integration schedule exceeded expectations, and full implementation was achieved eighty-seven days in advance of contract. Initial reports of problems with the model were at first addressed by contracted systems analysis and software upgrades. However, when the first DRNs broke protocols, contracts were reviewed. Legislators began a review of alternative robotics solutions. The sixth precinct, the first to integrate, was the last station to de-integrate. Units that passed the Luger test were retained as backups for units that remained operational in three precincts city-wide, as the logic-based MX was introduced and the DRN program was phased out.”

The computer keeps narrating and John keeps walking. He remembers most of this, after all. He remembers seeing DRNs on the news, in the precinct before the failures. He remembers thinking maybe he should have been more worried about the uniforms’ jobs, because DRNs seemed to be pretty good detectives. He remembers when he saw a crazy one put its gun into its eye socket and pull the trigger. He remembers being glad the MXs replaced the model, right up until he wasn’t.

He stops the treadmill and waves the computer off. 

His discarded shirt makes a great towel for the sweat that drips off his face and neck. He pours himself a drink, and picks up his journal.

_“I want to be that person for him_.” _Creeps me the hell out. The way Dorian looked at me, like I was meant to save him when all I’ve done so far is not throw him out of my car. And let him call me by my name. That was a mistake. Now it’s all “John” this, and “John” that, and “How’s your leg today?” and “Did you talk to it like I showed you?” and “How much do you donate? As a percentage of your income?”_

_It’s not so bad that he asks, I guess. It’s that I feel like I’m talking to a real person. I’m saying I’m not ashamed of my fake leg before I even think about it, because I don’t want an android to feel bad. I wonder what Tilden would make of that? Hell, maybe he’d be glad I’m not rejecting more synthetic tech._

_Lock. Kennex, John. January 14, 2007_

#

Three days later, they’re at an expensive hotel where some guy got dead. The vic was a sexbot maker named Sebastian Jones. John’s never used a sexbot, and he doesn’t have much of an opinion about them or their maker. But the shooters who did Jones were pros; the room has been coated with suspect DNA, the shell casings they left behind were third-generation absorption rounds, and they wore flash masks so no hotel camera has a useable image of them.

The case evolves from a simple murder to conspiracy when the sexbot sheds the DNA of a missing person. Three hours later, another woman is abducted with the same M.O., but this time her son was left behind in the family SUV. Dorian craps all over John in front of Valerie Stahl, telling her John hates kids and cats and some other shit John denies before he even hears what the android is saying. He wants to flash an intra-office message: _if Dorian tells you anything about me, assume the opposite is true_.

When he questions the son, Victor, it goes fine, which he totally expected. John wants Dorian to tell Valerie Stahl _that_ , but he still isn’t interested in her, she’s still out of his league, and bringing her up will only fuel Dorian’s perverse interest in John’s private life. Dorian’s interest is already like a self-contained flare; it doesn’t need outside fuel to keep it burning.

Until the intel from Victor turns up a lead, Stahl points them to Aurelian Sapiens and the vic’s business partner, Lorenzo Shaw. They aren’t two minutes out of the precinct when Dorian asks, “What do you tell a small child when someone dies?”

This question takes John completely by surprise, and he wishes they were back at the station and Dorian was just crapping on him in front of Valerie. Kristen Haseman could be dead already, but for her kid he hopes she isn’t.

“I’ve never considered that,” Dorian continues, “what you would tell a small child.”

Dorian isn’t just making conversation. This is another Big Question, the kind he saves for the privacy of the car and wants John to help him understand. “Well,” John says, “you’d say the same thing you’d say to an adult.”

“What do they say?”

_Christ_. “You tell him that the person that died has gone to a better place.”

“Why would anyone say that when there’s no way to really know where living things go once they stop living?”

John watches streetlights flash by, and thinks about how Dorian phrased the question: _living things,_ and _when they stop living_. Not _people,_ and _when people die._ “It’s designed to give hope, comfort,” he says. “To ease the pain. People believe it because they need to.” It’s as good an explanation as any, but he doesn’t know if Dorian can comprehend believing something because you want to, because it makes you feel better, without any empirical data to back it up.

“Hmm,” Dorian says. “The data I’ve studied suggest that the best proof of one’s existence is if one is remembered after they’re gone. Was your partner’s son told that his father went to a better place?”

It’s hard not to flinch. Dorian’s supposed to be so intuitive, and he opened little Marty’s gift himself, the one John never delivered; he should have put it together. “I don’t know.”

The pause is brief. “You never spoke to your partner’s son,” Dorian says. John tries not to respond to what sounds like empathy. “I can understand why that would be hard for you.”

_How_? John wants to ask for maybe the hundredth time. He’s started a list of his own Big Questions. How the hell could Dorian possibly understand why it’s hard for him to go and see Pelham’s wife, Pelham’s son, after all this time has passed for them but so little has passed for him? Does Dorian get that John, by letting Anna into his life, probably leaked information that caused the deaths of all those cops?

Is it just Dorian’s colloquialism thing? _I can understand_ , then fill in the blank or repeat whatever the speaker said?

John sees annoying conversations with Rudy in his future.

They meet Lorenzo. Dorian collects some intel, and John thinks maybe Dorian insulted him about getting distracted by bots that were designed to be distracting. It’s not fair. They find Yuri Idrizi, though, and not much later, they find the sexbot from Jones’ hotel room, stripped of all its humanizing features: no hair, no dermal layer, no fingernails, no nipples, no nothing. All that’s left is the body, which they deliver to Rudy, who disassembles its head while they wait, to get at any remains of its memory.

Dorian does that thing again that makes John suspect the whole colloquial subroutine. This android is pissed. No way is somebody crazy enough to program pissed off into a personality subroutine. Except that Dorian is definitely pissed.

Rudy empathizes, apologizes, asks if Dorian wants to wait somewhere else so he doesn’t have to watch the robot dissection.

Dorian stays pissed.

It’s worse later, in the car, when Dorian goes mute in the weird way. John rolls his eyes, but he asks. “You’re quiet. What’s wrong?” He hopes the answer is “nothing.” He’s sure it won’t be.

Dorian flashes a tiny shadow of his usual humor. “Just—looking at that bot on Rudy’s table. Makes me think. Who is going to remember me?”

That Big Question, at least, has an easy answer, or would if Dorian were human. John says it anyway. “You’re a cop. The people you help will remember you.” They’ll remember a DRN, anyway. He adds, “Whatever your name is.”

Dorian looks pretty happy with that, so John counts himself lucky he won’t have to do anything else. Babysitting an android….

Dorian perks up some more. “Speaking of names,” he says, “someone just responded to your dating profile, John.”

“My dating pro—I thought you were kidding!”

“Not kidding.” Dorian laughs. “I saw the way you were looking at those sexbots. Your profile name is Dr. Richard.”

He’s going to kill another android. “Dr. Richard.”

“He likes quiche, long walks on the beach, smooth jazz…”

Definitely killing another android. Today. An MX would abandon him to certain death, but at least it wouldn’t try to fucking set him up on dates.

“I ran a bioscan, and it looked like your testicles were at full capacity.”

He’s—it’s— “You’re scanning my balls?” It’s scanning his balls. It’s—no way. John’s going to find the person who wrote the colloquialism routine and kill _them_.

“I didn’t enjoy it,” Dorian says, and John doesn’t know if that’s supposed to be better or worse. “I just—I can’t help but notice. You’re backed up.”

This is why he should never, _ever_ try and be helpful with Dorian. It never ends well for him. He beats back embarrassment while Dorian sits in the passenger seat, waiting. It’s the _patient_ quiet.

He doesn’t take his eyes off the road, because if Dorian’s smirking right now, John won’t be held responsible for his actions. “Don’t scan my testicles,” he orders. “Ever again.”

“Copy that.”

But the fact of the matter is, John doesn’t meet people, outside the precinct. And if he did, after Anna, he doesn’t know how he’d trust one. Maybe the “Dr. Richard” handle was a good idea after all.

He glances over, feels his neck heat up. He’s going to regret this. Eyes locked firmly on the street in front of him, he asks, “What does she look like?”

“What do you want her to look like?”

He talks fast, ignores that weird tone of voice. “Brown eyes. Soulful. Average height. I like brunettes.”

“Would you date anyone in your profession, or would you prefer to date someone outside of it?”

“Sure. Either way. I like smart women, you know? Women who are smarter than me.”

“That won’t be hard.”

John gets it, and gives up on trying not to smile. The ball scanning is forgiven.

Dorian says, “You are aware that you just described Detective Stahl, right?”

He did not, and he’s not falling for that. Valerie is beautiful, and so what if she’s got soulful eyes and brunette hair and is way smarter than him? She’s ten years younger than he is, and she’s a chrome so she’ll live to be at least ten years older. She is so far out of his league, the light from her planet takes years to reach his.

* * *

The DNA in the sexbot, Vanessa’s, skin belongs to another missing person. Back at the station John tries to question her, but he doesn’t get very far. She hasn’t seen any of the missing women, and she doesn’t know her origin or ownership data.

Dorian cuts in. “Do you know where you were born?”

Shit. Seriously? The sexbot still doesn’t answer, but she smiles at Dorian. Like he’s a person. John gets an idea and shows her the other sexbot that shed DNA in the hotel where Sebastian Jones was killed. “You ever work with this girl?” he asks.

“Charlene,” she says.

“Do you know where she was… born?” Nothing. “Who owns you?” he asks again.

Dorian interrupts. “She’s probably not conscious of those terms.” He doesn’t sound happy. Good. John’s not happy either.

He tries another approach. “We think they were taking you to be destroyed.”

“Why would anybody want to destroy me?” she asks. “There are much, much better things to do with me.” The hand on his leg leaves no doubt. “People look for connections in different ways.” She skips past his groin and up to his chest. John doesn’t know if stopping her would be an insult or something. “That’s all people are looking for,” she says. “Someone who cares about them.”

John looks to Dorian for help. Dorian, damn him, lets him flounder. John’s done. He takes her wrist and pushes her hand off him.

The bot looks down at the image of the sexbot that the Albanians have already destroyed. “Do you know where Charlene is?” she asks Dorian.

Dorian says, “Yes.”

John remembers the bot frame on Rudy’s table. Dorian’s anger as Rudy pried apart the head.

“Can I see her?” Vanessa asks.

“Why do you want to?” Dorian asks.

She looks confused. “I don’t know.”

“You were designed to bond with people.” Dorian’s using that overly sincere, working-with-the-public voice. “That’s what you were developed to do.”

_Shit_ , John thinks. He eases out of the way.

“To notice when they’re there,” Dorian says. “That also means you notice when they’re _not_ there. That’s why you want to see her. That’s what you’re feeling.”

John steps away from Dorian’s little enlightenment session, but not before he has his own epiphany. Is Dorian designed to bond with people? To notice when they’re there and when they’re not there? Does Dorian want to see people he prioritizes as important? Does he think he feels for them?

Dorian has proved he notices plenty about his partner. John might say it’s like any good cop would, if not for Dorian pestering him about the picture of John and Martin Pelham’s family that sits on his desk, or prying until John let him open Marty Junior’s two-year-old birthday present, or the accusations about kids and cats, the ball scanning….

John feels it like a weight, a responsibility he doesn’t want and didn’t ask for. He rejects it whole cloth.

“Who told you to go with the men we found you with tonight?” John asks the sexbot.

“Yuri,” she says, and John is ecstatic to be able to focus only on the case. She asks, “Do you know Yuri?”

He hasn’t wanted to rush in and shoot somebody this badly in a while. Almost two years, to be exact.

They don’t find the skin lab, but Dorian finds a clue, something about the sexbots’ learning modules and how they’re the same processors that were used in DRNs. John listens in on the call to Rudy, and doesn’t flinch when Rudy says the bot was “born” instead of “made,” too. Of course Rudy thinks about androids like that. Rudy always did.

But Rudy finds her origin point fast enough that they don’t even stand down the strike team, just re-route to the new location.

Yuri is trying to shut down their operation. It’s the smart play, but if John’s too late to save the missing woman, he isn’t sure what he’ll do. He’s happy to put four into an armed asshole firing at him, but he gets separated from the MXs bringing up the rear when he runs between two rows of computers.

He turns the corner, sees Yuri, and his focus narrows, peripheral vision fading as he sights down his gun barrel. “Drop the weapon, Yuri!” he shouts. He hopes Yuri won’t.

“John!” Dorian yells from behind him, and John looks in time to see Dorian put a second round into the chest of a guy who’s already on the floor. _At my processing speed…_ It might shock him, if he took the time to think about it. Then Dorian touches his back and John realizes he was wide open.

He leaves Yuri to the MXs and runs on, with Dorian at his back, looking for the women. They find more than they expected, and most are still alive. Kristen Haseman is alive, and John thinks about her son, Victor, waiting while his father rushes home from Lithuania and scared he’ll never see his mom again. This is why John’s a cop. This is why it’s worth it.

Back at the precinct, John tells Dorian to go charge before he sneaks off to the racks and tries to sleep, but he can only stare at the ceiling. It took time at the crime scene, and it’ll be three or four hours before Kristen Haseman will be released to come back here and pick up her son. John wants to be here when she does, and he thinks Dorian will, too.

He gives up on sleep when he hears the air vent/filtration system power up for day shift, grabs a shower and puts on his only clean shirt. Nobody expects him to work today, but Dorian should be in the bullpen by 8:00. John drinks coffee and reads over his blurry prelim report, then realizes that Dorian has been in the bullpen since before John walked in. John blinks at his coffee. Clearly, he needs something stronger.

He sees the blue light show before Dorian turns with that purposeful stride, and knows Kristen Haseman is waiting at visitor intake. He comms Child Services to have Victor brought up. When Dorian escorts Haseman in, it’s perfect: shrieked, “Mommy, mommy, mommy!” and Ms. Haseman’s much more faint, “Victor, oh my baby.”

When Victor wriggles from her arms and reaches to John for a hug, John sends a superior smile toward his android over the kid’s shoulder. Dorian just smirks, like it should all be beneath a well-adjusted human.

John smiles harder. Maybe it should be, but nobody would claim John Kennex is well adjusted.

He gives Victor back to his mother and is heading toward his desk when Valerie Stahl arrives. “Great work,” she tells him. She’s definitely impressed with him right now.

“Thanks.”

“You should celebrate.”

“He will,” Dorian says. To John, he says, “You have a date.” Dorian outs him about the stupid dating website that is _totally Dorian’s fault_ , and bot-blocks him with Valerie—Valerie who he is absolutely not interested in, and who he isn’t going to _get_ interested in. John still lets him go when Dorian says he wants to be there when they turn off Vanessa. It kind of bothers him, Dorian caring like that, so fast, for a bot. Maybe he saw something in her that looked too familiar. John did.

He wants to be somewhere too, somewhere he should have gone a long time ago. While Dorian’s gone John calls Maria Pelham again to confirm that he’ll swing by after shift.

Dorian returns a while later, and John sees the record of deactivation link to his case file. He doesn’t look at Dorian. “Check my report will you?” he asks, and throws his report from his terminal to the pull-out display Dorian usually takes. He could leave right now, but it’s barely noon and he won’t sleep, anyway. He’s staying until Marty Junior gets home from school. Then he’ll leave.

His report slides back onto his monitor a second later, with bright red tracking marks all over it. Dorian’s trying to annoy him. John lets him get away with it and revises the report, because Dorian’s working too hard to act like everything is normal. John ignores that too.

At two-thirty, he squeezes Dorian’s shoulder and says, “See ya,” then he goes to Pelham’s house. An hour with Maria and Marty Junior takes a lot out of him, and he feels like he’s been up for days. He makes promises to come back soon, with no idea whether or not he can keep them. He goes home with Dorian in his head.

His leg crapped out on him four times on his way to Pelham’s house, but at home he ignores his treadmill and his physical therapy, pours a drink, picks up his journal celo and starts up his stylized shorthand with a fingernail. He meanders some, writes about Maria Pelham, how weird it is that she and Marty Junior are doing so well.

Stupid coma.

It takes a while, to get to what’s eating at him today.

_Dorian does what it takes to get the job done. He leads me in when he thinks it’s too dangerous for me to go first, but he doesn’t pretend he can push me around. He fires fast if someone’s aiming a gun my way. Maybe he’s learning from me, and maybe that’s not such a good thing: he double-tapped that guy last night, put a second bullet in him while the guy collapsed to the floor. I think it was because the shooter was behind me, and I didn’t know I was vulnerable. But his first shot removed the threat. He could have left the guy alive, for information. MXs were behind him._

_I felt him touch me after, square on my back, like human cops do to let you know they have you covered._

_It made me remember too much about partnerships, shit that doesn’t help me at all. Neither did last night’s insomnia, or working with Dorian after he came back from watching Vanessa get destroyed, even though he tried to pretend like nothing was wrong. Who programs a machine to reveal that it’s pretending something? Nobody does. _

_Top that off with seeing Maria and Marty Junior doing so well… longest day I’ve had in a while._

_I’m glad they’re good. I am. But they remind me that seventeen months in a coma is seventeen months everyone else had to get on with their lives, to grieve, to forget. I’m closer to it than anyone else—to good people dying, to losing my leg, to all of it._

_Back before the raid on the precinct, Dorian told me he feels. Just as much as I do._

_I hope to hell he doesn’t. What I feel sucks, and I’ve had an entire life to learn how to deal with feelings. If DRNs feel as much as humans do, it’s no wonder some of them went nuts._

_Lock. Kennex, John. January 14, 2007_

#

It’s been a bad week. Two teenaged chromes are dead, so people are breathing down the commissioner’s neck even while they keep secrets.

If that weren’t bad enough, now Dorian’s busting him in a public hallway in the precinct. “I know you’ve been taking Membliss, John,” he says as they walk along.

Dorian sounds accusatory. John’s been late for dates plenty of times. He knows that voice.

Dorian isn’t done. “I’m required to give updates on your mental and physical condition every seventy-two hours. You thought I wouldn’t detect it?”

John doesn’t know what he thought, but he did think he was the only one required to report on his partner’s status twice a week.  When he doesn’t answer, Dorian raises his voice loud enough that somebody—an MX, comms systems, a passing officer in the hallway—might hear.

“Are you seeing a recollectionist?” _Again_ lies unspoken between them.

“Look, I’ve got it under control,” he says, to shut Dorian up. Dorian is too good at forcing his hand. John keeps walking while Dorian starts in with a lecture about the risks, makes sure it looks like any other day when John is ignoring his android who won’t shut up, until he runs out of patience and turns, using a hand to stop Dorian and back him up toward a wall. “I need those pills to help me. They open up memory clusters so I can remember things.”

Dorian meets his eyes. “About the ambush.”

“Right,” he says. Dorian’s eyes shift minutely, probably scanning him, and John realizes that he lost his cool. He reins in his feelings, his desperation, his need to make up for what happened two years ago. He reins everything in tight. “Look,” he says, as even and calm as if he were talking to an MX, “I’ve got it under control.” He’s not sure Dorian believes him, but Dorian shuts up about it.

When John wrecks the patrol car an hour later, it’s impossible for even John to believe himself.

He focuses on the case, tries to downplay the fact that a piece of pipe ripped off Dorian’s ear when John wrecked the car. “It doesn’t look that bad,” he says, while they wait for their suspect to open the door.

Dorian glares. “I’m sorry, could you speak up, please?” He says it loud, and John grits his teeth. _Bastard._

As they head back to the car, Sandra texts him for a private meet at her favorite bar, and he knows he’s in trouble.

He pitches the car keys to Dorian. “Dee. You drive,” he says, because two wrecks in one day isn’t worth the risk.

Being cooped up in the car with an annoyed android isn’t a party, either. “I thought we had a deal, John,” Dorian accuses before they’re out of the suspect’s driveway.

John curses under his breath. Dorian likes to drive, and John might have hoped letting him do it would distract Dorian from bitching. Dorian drives well, but he also drives at exactly the speed limit and obeys all traffic laws, which is the biggest reason John drives. Dorian gives him a look to back up the accusation. “I said I’d tell you when I thought it was safe enough—”

“You saw Reinhart three weeks ago,” he says, cutting Dorian off. “With the captain. She’s ready to negotiate with him, and he says he knows where Anna is. If he knows, maybe I know.” He taps his temple.

Dorian turns his head to stare at John. “And maybe,” he says, “if you fry your synapses, you’ll never be able to retrieve the data you have stored in that hard head of yours. So no one in the department will ever know, and InSyndicate won’t be stopped because you have the patience and self-preservation instincts of a three-year-old.”

“Eyes on the road,” John snaps, even though he knows Dorian is jacked into the car’s sensors and doesn’t need to look to see where he’s going.

Dorian looks disgusted. “John. I’m not trying to protect you at the expense of a criminal network’s activities. I’m trying to protect you so we can _find and stop_ their activities. Can’t you see the difference, man?”

He can. But he’s still got a date with Sandra, who happens to be one of his oldest friends on the force and also his boss. “I’m gonna go quiet mode for a while,” he says, “if it’s all the same to you.” He slumps in the passenger seat and closes his eyes.

Dorian keeps up with the lecture for a couple of minutes, but eventually it must register on his programming that John is in not-listening mode, too. So he starts singing. Which annoys John to hell and back. Dorian has perfect pitch. His voice was designed to be modulated and beautiful to listen to. And he can mimic any voice he wants. But when he’s singing “for fun,” as he says, he’s just imperfect enough to get on John’s nerves. John doesn’t have to be a detective to know that’s _exactly_ why Dorian does it, just one more in a string of petty robot punishments Dorian has loaded in his arsenal.

John leaves Dorian in the precinct and goes to meet Sandra. When she asks, “So how’re you feeling?” he says, “You sound like Dorian.” He isn’t sure Dorian ratted him out, but he wants to believe Sandra found out on her own. She’s known him a long time.

“Look John,” she says. “I know who you are. And I care about you enough to tell you the truth. If you obsess about revenge, it’ll take you down.”

Maybe she’s right. But it’s been almost two years for her, too, and barely more than three months, for him. How is he supposed to walk away?

“Now that you’re remembering things,” she says, “we’re gonna have to talk to Internal Affairs again.”

So that’s the reason for the off-the-books meeting. She knows more than she wants to.

He knows less than he needs to.

If he’s talking to I.A. again, he’s going to see the recollectionist one more time, eke out whatever he can get. Dorian’s not his mother or his keeper, and if a human can’t keep him from doing what needs to be done, there’s no way an android will. John checks with Android Tech to confirm that Dorian’s in charging before he drives to the Koln Avenue District. Dorian will still find out, because goddamn, that android is smart. But it’s worth it when John remembers the nesting dolls Anna gave him when she came back from a trip to Montreal. They look innocuous, but he takes them to McGinnis in Crime Scene Analysis. McGinnis has helped him before, and she’s one of the few people around who doesn’t act like the raid, and InSyndicate, and Anna, are all ancient history. Or entirely his fault.

On the chrome murder case, he works out that two teenaged girls got dead because a parent got so obsessed with her losses, they sucked her into a hole she couldn’t climb out of. Mom talks about her need for revenge, her need to make people pay. Then John sees Mom’s murder board, a collection of evidence and photographs, connections and ideas, post-it notes hovered over everything. It looks so much like the case board John has been building at home, it shocks him. He understands this. He has been _doing_ this.

After shift, John goes home and paces his house, feeling trapped by plex walls and too much floor space. He should have sold it, but he couldn’t let it go. And if his mother is to be believed, her security will hold against all comers. So far, it looks like only John’s precinct has penetrated it, and with Sandra’s authority both times. Since he woke up John has paid some of the best people in the business to try.

He leans against his work desk and stares blindly at a pastel rainbow of e-notes that ask questions with no answers. _Who is Anna Moore? What is Goshen? Anna arrives in Rome. How did she pass a background check? Parisian underground protests. Keynote at Oxford? Where’s Anna? Found her looking through files, claimed she was looking for photos. First visit to Rome?_ So many unanswered questions make him feel sick, tight in the throat like it’s hard to breathe. Like he’s drowning.

He swipes his case boards clean and leans against his desk. He has no idea where to go from here. Then McGinnis calls from Crime Scene Analysis, and tells him the dolls had nanotech in the paint. They were a transmitter. “Someone’s been listening to you,” she says. “The last upload was seven hours ago.”

He disconnects without a word. He doesn’t even thank her. Has he said anything, discussed a case with anyone? His windows are one-way view, and the security in them repels known surveillance tech. Who has he let in? Who has called?

His mother stayed for a few days, right when he got home, until he chased her out.

The physiologist who set up his leg’s charger and gave him his physical therapy routine was here, but John barely answered her questions about pain and movement and his problem with the leg calibration.

Sandra visited a few times after he came home from the hospital center, but every time he tried to bring up the raid she’d said, “It’s history, John. Literally. Over a year and a half ago. Get healthy, get back to work. Then we’ll talk.”

Dorian saw his case board that one day, but all he’d said was, “John?”

All John had said was, “Shut up,” before he’d swiped the displays dark.

Lucky for him he’s not a talker.

He looks back at the case board, wiped clean of all of the overlays, all the questions. Only the crime scene photos on the desk remain: bodies of criminals and cops, angles that show where all the bullet casings fell, all the explosives blew… his leg lying on the ground, where it landed after it tore away from his body. He has to let it go or turn into some crazy person who becomes only about the past—worse, a crazy person whose obsession lets people use him again, learn things they shouldn’t. But he’s had a listening device in his home for twenty-three months, and he did answer phone calls. Even if it wasn’t about InSyndicate, he could have said something somebody could use.

He needs to tell Sandra, without telling his captain. He’s not sure how clear that line is, anymore. He heads back to the patrol car, fast, drives even faster to Rudy’s lab. “How secure is Dorian?” he asks before Rudy can say hello.

“What?”

“How secure is he? And how good is he? If Dorian did a sweep-and-scan of an area, would he find everything? And if he did, could he keep it to himself?”

“If you asked him to, yes,” Rudy says. “DRNs are very loyal. And Dorian, well, he’s more special than most.”

Sandra said something like that about Dorian too, but John doesn’t have the time or the interest to work it out right now. “Okay. I’m dragging him out of the charge bay.”

“He isn’t in the charge bay,” Rudy says.

John frowns. “What?” It’s three hours after shift. Where else would he be?

Rudy frowns back. “John. Androids, even a DRN in an MX bay, need less than five hours to charge, and that’s if they’re run down to emergency backup. They’re used for other purposes when not on primary duty. Dorian, because he’s so good with people, takes witness statements on a split shift, when the two of you aren’t on overtime.”

“Witness statements.”

Rudy looks shocked. “You ride in a car with him every day. How do you now _know_ this?”

He doesn’t know because Dorian didn’t tell him. And John didn’t ask because Dorian’s an android.

John hits his comm. “Dorian.”

“Yes, John?” The answer is immediate, so if Dorian’s with a witness now, he’s prioritizing John.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in the precinct.”

Damned if Dorian _still_ doesn’t tell him what he’s doing. John knows Dorian hid it on purpose, now. “What case are you on?” he asks.

“Yes, we can discuss that at your convenience, Detective,” Dorian says, so he’s with a witness or a victim and it’s not a petty crime.

“Wrap it up as soon as you can and log off on my I.D. I’ll be in the bullpen in ten minutes to pick you up.”

“Copy that.”

While they’re still in the precinct, John whispers, “Scan the car when we get to it. Scan everything about it for listening devices. _Everything_. If you find something, block it or break it. Then talk.”

Dorian raises his eyebrows, clearly interested in the puzzle. When they reach the car, John closes his door and waits while Dorian walks around its exterior, trailing his fingers over the surface. He runs a hand along the rear window frames, the headliner. He opens John’s door, and John holds still when Dorian pats him down. The circuitry on fingers and thumb flashes as Dorian’s hands contact the tech in John’s pockets.

Dorian finishes his circuit, climbs into the passenger seat, then reaches out and touches the St. Christopher medal, turning it in his fingers like he did the first day they rode together. This time, his finger flashes blue.

“The car is clean,” he says, and drops his hand. “What’s the hell is going on?”

“My place wasn’t, this morning,” John says, and gets on the road. “Don’t talk to me about traffic lights and speed limits.”

“We could run the car’s emergency lights.”

John shakes his head. “I don’t want whoever compromised me to know I’m cleaning house.”

Dorian must jump onto the traffic and surveillance system, because lights turn green as John approaches them. He doesn’t ask. He knows already that Dorian won’t do it just for his convenience, and now he knows that if he pisses Dorian off, Dorian can add red lights to his list of petty robot punishments.

When John parks the cruiser in front of his house Dorian says, “Won’t it seem strange, having me in the apartment in complete silence for the time it takes me to perform a passive sweep?”

John narrows his eyes, but Dorian just smiles brightly. 

“You should show me around,” Dorian says. “You can revel in your glory days if you want to.”

John scowls. This is probably a new strategy of Dorian’s to pry into his personal life. If it is, it works. John doles out details about half of the ribbons and trophies and holograms in his spare room, which doesn’t bother him even though he suspects that Dorian has stopped his scanning and started mentally redecorating the room.

John’s suspicions are confirmed when Dorian says, “You know, John, most people would put their beds in the bedroom.”

“Most people are idiots,” John replies. “I wake up to the best view in the house.” He didn’t mean to share that, but it isn’t Top Secret intelligence, so he sighs and moves on. “Anything else you want to know about my childhood?” he asks. “Vaccination records? First kiss?”

Blue tracers flash across Dorian’s temple. “Your vaccination records are in the police database,” he says. “And current. Your first kiss was with Darrius Watkins in the seventh grade. He was two years your senior.”

John sputters. He can’t even find words.

Dorian smirks. “You were his first kiss, too. He posted it on his e-Life timeline.”

“I am never doing this again,” John says. He figures anyone listening wouldn’t believe the farce if he’s polite, anyway.

“I’m surprised you’re doing it now,” Dorian replies, and he steps toward John.

John doesn’t think about it until Dorian’s so close that he grips John shoulder, right up by his neck, to keep him from backing away. Dorian doesn’t have much in the way of boundaries, not with John. But this is close. Dorian’s eyes dart around, an android thing that John would bet Dorian thinks conveys deep meaning. Then Dorian uses his free hand to point around the room, which only emphasizes for John how one hand is occupied, touching the bare skin of his neck. It feels weird, not natural like human skin but not bad, either.

John frowns. “What?”

He stiffens when Dorian leans in, but he gets it when Dorian whispers, “Clear in here.” His breath is very warm. Androids don’t have lungs in there; they have heat dissipators.

John shrugs out from under the hand on his neck. “I’m done indulging an android. You can start walking back to the precinct any time you want.”

“You’re such a wonderful host, John,” Dorian says, all mock-sincerity.

John watches him walk back to the front door, take off his jacket and hang it up, then bend to pull off his boots.

Dorian has feet. Normal-looking, human feet. John doesn’t know why that shocks him. He knew the gray onesie they stored Dorian in wasn’t skin; it was an anti-static protection suit. Still, John frowns. Feet. “What the hell are you doing?” he asks, more wary than annoyed.

“Living rooms are made for company,” Dorian says as he shrugs out of his holster. “Living room furniture is made for comfort.”

John plants himself between the door and his living area. “Yeah…”

Dorian smiles, full voltage. “I’m trying out your bed.”

John doesn’t even have to shift. “No you’re not.”

Dorian holds up his hands. “All right, all right. Nice rug, at least.” He pads around the open plan area, picking up objects, asking questions. Dorian learns that yes, John plays guitar, that the replicas were John’s dad’s. John tells Dorian to shut up about the fact that the tires on his mountain bike are flat. He explains the books printed on paper (also his father’s), and the smart house’s customizations (his mother’s).

“Your mother is extremely skilled,” Dorian says.

“She’s extremely smart.”

“A smart woman,” Dorian says in that slow, secretive tone. He meets John’s gaze, holds it, and grins like he’s trying not to. “Smarter than you.”

That’s when John realizes, finally, that his android has been flirting with him. He feels his neck heat up but he doesn’t say anything, because Dorian can’t know that’s what he’s doing. “I’m gonna heat some dinner,” he says. “Look all you want.”

Dorian dials down the smile. “Thanks, man. I can’t believe you’re honoring your bet to let me experience your personal life like this.”

They’ve worked together for weeks, now, and John doesn’t miss a beat. “I can’t believe I made a bet with a robot.”

He stays in the kitchen for as long as he can justify, hollering answers when he thinks he absolutely has to, trying to remember if Dorian used that tone of voice before the case with the sexbots. Yeah. Yeah, he did. In the scrubbers’ alley, the underground hallway filled with smoke and cops and two downed criminals, Dorian said, _I’ll send you the bill_ in just that tone. John reminds himself that androids designed to work with the public are programmed to be attractive, appealing. Dorian’s a far more advanced example than the first DRAs in LumoCorp’s line.

Dorian calls out, “Hey, I didn’t know you had cable.”

The echo of voice, and the subject, means Dorian’s in the loft. “My mom’s!” he shouts. Then he wonders if he has to shout, and says in a normal voice, “She worked in hardware before she specialized in programming.”

“What?”

He repeats it louder. Is that another behavior designed to make Dorian seem more human? The DRN Dorian took for a ride-along did the same thing, made John turn up the radio because it was in the back seat, when it could just as easily have listened in over its net. John’s going to have a talk with Dorian about this—this faking shit. 

“Why is it here?” Dorian calls.

“She stayed for a few days, right when I got home, and brought it with her to keep herself busy, I guess,” He yells. “She’s a parent. It’s what they do.”

Dorian appears in the kitchen doorway holding a bin filled with tools and miniaturized hardware, including cable that ranges from fiber-optic to gauges so fine John can barely see them. “Parents assemble micro-bot toys?” He looks too interested.

John scowls. “They visit when their kids are sick.”

Dorian blinks and turns away. “She didn’t spend much time in the hospital with you, after the first month.”

John closes his eyes, thinks that Dorian’s just a machine who doesn’t know any better. It’s probably an algebra problem, A = B = C: if mothers visit their kids when they’re sick, and John was sick for seventeen months, his mother should have visited him.

“I think she thought I was going to die,” he says.

Seconds pass before Dorian replies. “Oh.” His voice is softer. “I’m sorry, John.”

John sighs and rinses off his chopsticks. He has already eaten twice as much food as he wanted, and wiped down counters that were already clean. He’s run out of ways to stall, in here, so he grabs a beer and heads into the living room, where he finds Dorian stretched out on his bed.

“What the _hell_ , Dorian?” he demands. “That’s my _bed_!”

“In your living room,” Dorian says. “It’s very comfortable.”

“Get. Off.” He swallows down half his beer. Criminals spying on him might be better than this.

Dorian rolls to his side and props his head up on a bent arm. “You do know that’s a euphemism for orgasm, don’t you?”

That answers one question; Dorian definitely knows he’s flirting. “In this case,” John says, “it’s an order to get the hell off my bed before I shoot you and throw your scraps in the bay out there.” He points to the water, still and calm, outside the security plex. 

Dorian ignores him and rolls around a little more, like he’s luxuriating in the sensation of down comforter or soft mattress. The tracer lights at fingertips and along his cheek remind John that Dorian’s scanning it, probably synching with its smart features to make sure they haven’t been compromised. John turns his back and stares out at the water.

His robot partner flirts with him. What’s he supposed to do about it? _Ignore it_ , the smart part of his brain tells him. Ignore it like he ignores everything about Dorian that he doesn’t want to deal with. Like he ignores Dorian getting philosophical about death, or grieving a de-activated sexbot, or trying to adopt another DRN or constantly pushing at John’s boundaries. Like he ignores how he treats Dorian like a person.

The hand on his shoulder makes him flinch so hard, he shakes beer out of the bottle and over his hand. 

“You’re way too tense, John,” Dorian says. Then he jerks his chin, a tiny, negative motion. “If letting me see your place bothers you that much, I can stop.”

“Of course you should stop,” John says. “Your interest in my personal life is totally inappropriate. And unhealthy.” Dorian smiles and heads toward the door. “And _weird_ ,” he yells at Dorian’s back.

He watches Dorian’s bare feet against the carpet.

At the door, Dorian dons his boots and holster, picks up his jacket. John sips his beer. “I take it you’re done prying?” he asks.

Dorian meets his eyes and smiles the more familiar smile, the little one that only uses half of his face. “The place is clean,” he says. “I found only one sensor, here by the door when I removed my boots—sorry about that, by the way—and de-activated it. It will look like the mic blew, possibly in response to the proximity of my net.” Once he shoulders back into his jacket he asks, “Was it the nesting dolls?”

John scowls. “How did you guess?”

Dorian shrugs and walks back into the living area, drops into a chair like it’s a natural thing for an android to do. “They were here before, and they weren’t really ‘you’. That’s why I asked about the robotics parts, incidentally.”

John narrows his eyes. “And the guitars? The holos? Going through my drawers? The stuff on my e-reader? My _bed?_ ”

Dorian’s smile flares briefly, then fades. “The good thing is, the technology in those dolls is very old, and the listening device had limited gain. You would have had to be at your desk for it to record anything.”

The video pickup for his phone is on his desk. “How do you know?”

“I just checked the department records. McGinnis charges very little time to overhead. Almost half of it coincides with visits from you.”

John drops heavily into a chair and sets his beer bottle on the floor. He’s going to have to take this to Reynolds in I.A., to keep McGinnis out of trouble and protect the precinct. Someone’s been listening in, as frequently as they wanted to, since before the raid two years ago. 

John doesn’t remember work sucking this much. He doesn’t remember feeling like something—everything, every _one_ —is suspect.

“John.”

John doesn’t look up.

“John,” Dorian repeats. “Devices like that aren’t triggered remotely. It could have been uploading to nowhere.”

John turns his head to glare. “Yeah. That’s likely,” he says. He doesn’t try to hide his sarcasm. “Let’s bet on that.”

Dorian looks pained. He leans forward, clasps his hands together. “Then look on the bright side: once you report it, it may be possible to trace the upload address. This could be a lead, John.”

John looks over at his cleared crime board. “It’s not a lead I can use,” he says. He’s exhausted. “I can’t keep doing this. I’ll drive myself crazy and be useless as a cop.”

Dorian looks upset—like, lost little kid upset. “I don’t understand.”

John rubs his forehead, grips it hard and digs into his temples with finger and thumb. “It’s a human thing, Dorian. I don’t expect you to understand.”

The silence stretches, but if John has offended his robot, that’s his robot’s problem. John has bigger things to worry about. He picks up his beer and leans back in his chair, stares out the window at the bay.

“You’re worried you’ll obsess, misread information. Maybe decide the wrong person is guilty, or take matters into your own hands. Because everyone else has moved on but it’s still raw, for you. You feel alone with it.”

John surges out of his chair, riding on fury. He leans down over Dorian, shoves a finger against his chest, anger fueled by the certainty that he can’t cause the android any pain. “I let you in here to do a security sweep, not to read my personal, private information! Do you hear me?”

The initial look of—distress, whatever—fades, and tracer lights race over every circuit in Dorian’s skin. He looks down at John’s finger. “I haven’t,” he says. He’s quiet, so quiet John barely hears him over the static of rage in his ears. “I was just thinking about Mrs. Hoving. She said she tried to let her daughter’s death go, but it consumed her. Then I thought about you.”

The words shock every nerve, hot-and-cold pain like when they first attached his new leg to the implanted socket. A hand comes up, slow, touches John’s chest, and John flinches when Dorian looks up at him. Dorian’s too close. John’s too close.

“I haven’t invaded your privacy, John. I didn’t do what you just accused me of doing.” The pressure of Dorian’s palm is gentle, but it’s implacable, and John is forced back as Dorian rises out of the chair. Police bots are way stronger than humans. “Speaking as someone who has almost no privacy,” he says, “I wouldn’t take yours away from you.”

“Get your hand off me,” John says, but his own hand drops to his side. He’s still shaking, but he doesn’t know what to do with it now. Doesn’t know if Dorian read his journal and is lying about it, or if he really is that intuitive.

Dorian looks away, then he steps away. “I should go back to the station,” he says. “I might be running low on charge.”

“I’ll call you a sector car.”

“No need,” Dorian says. He’s halfway to the door already. “I’ve got it.” Then he’s out, and the door snicks shut behind him.

John scrubs his hands over his face. His skin burns from the dump of adrenaline. Running low on charge. Bullshit. He looks around, picks up the beer bottle and takes it to the recyc. More meetings with Internal Affairs. They’ll go over his place again. Go over his life again.

Maybe he should leave before he gets fired. Before he can do any more damage or cost anyone else their lives. 

He wonders what will happen to Dorian if he quits.

#

A week later, John thinks he might need to take his anger management a little more seriously.

His follow-up with Internal Affairs was as bad as he expected it to be, and after he got through three interviews without punching anyone, he was required to sign an affidavit swearing not to continue any off-the-books investigations. It doesn’t mean he won’t, but it does mean he’ll be quicker to bring intel to someone’s attention.

In the car, he glances over at Dorian, lets him get away with singing off key. They’ve only completed four shifts together since Dorian’s scan of his house, and if Dorian thinks being pissy in private is going to get him somewhere, he’s got a lot more shifts to figure out it’s not going to work.

“Did you report that sweep-and-scan of my place?” John asks.

Dorian finishes his verse before he says, “No.”

“Thanks. I need you to do another one, after I.A.’s.”

Dorian stops singing. “You think Internal Affairs is going to plant bugs in your house. Are you sure you’re not being obsessive, or misreading information, John?”

Okay, maybe he deserves that. “No,” he says, since this is the first time Dorian has called him “John” in private since he left John’s place.

Dorian goes quiet, his pondering-quiet. When the hell did John start thinking he recognized Dorian’s silences? But he steels himself, because he knows he’s not wrong.

“John…”

“Don’t mention it,” John says. “Please.”

More silence. _Deciding-quiet_ , he thinks. Then Dorian says, “Did you know that, even with modern anti-collision controls and increased effectiveness of impact protections, vehicular deaths have continued to rise steadily over the last fifteen years?”

John doesn’t smile. “That’s because more and more people can afford the cars, but too many of them can’t afford the safety features or live in regions without the tech.”

Dorian pauses. He’s not any kind of quiet, now; he’s just analyzing data. Maybe John needs to make an appointment with Dr. Tilden. “Hmm. You’re at least partly right.”

“Don’t sound so surprised,” John says, and when Dorian looks his way, he tries to smile.

* * *

John spends two days in a precinct rack because he's not sleeping in his house while I.A. roots around in it. Dorian spends more time with him, since John’s at the precinct all day, every day. They work on open cases and stay in the building until I.A. clears him, and Dorian asks personal questions that John mostly ignores.

After I.A. signs off on John’s place, Dorian doesn't ask. Dorian just follows him to the cruiser after shift and rides home with him. Dorian isn't as chatty this time around, but he does remind John to give his mother back her stuff. He keeps all his gear on, and he stays off John's bed.

John watches him with narrowed eyes, and finally prods. “Last time, you had to take off half your gear and hump my bed, and this time it’s not worth a second look?”

Dorian looks at him and smiles. “This time, it knows me.” He says it in the flirty voice.

John wants to tell Dorian that “knows” is a euphemism for sex. He doesn’t. If this euphemism stuff is the game, then his bed and his partner have gotten more play lately than he has.

Before he drives Dorian back to the station, John learns that his android is pretty tight with his house, too.

Late that night, John lies in his bed and stares out at lights on the bay. Most are still, but some move, barely-there motion that tells him someone is on the boat, walking around or making love, doing _something_ to upset the quiet calm of the water.

He can’t sleep because he keeps thinking about weird, stupid shit, like the fact that Dorian has human-looking feet. John doesn’t have a foot fetish. In fact, he has always been pretty vanilla in bed. Maybe it’s the flirty voice, or the novelty of an android with personality. Whatever the hell it is, John warns his smart bed to mind its own business and ignore the human jerking off under the covers. He has no idea what Dorian means when he says that software “tells” him things, and he doesn't want to find out. He doesn’t think too closely that his robot partner makes him hot, either, because competence has always turned him on. Machine or not, Dorian is competent.

John spills into his hand, belly clenching and body tilting to one side because his phantom foot can’t dig into the bed like the real one used to. Dorian is definitely competent.

It’s the best orgasm he’s had since he woke up from his coma.

This is not good.

#

     John calls in and takes some comp time, then he calls his mother and invites her to drop by later for a visit.

A few minutes before she’s due to arrive, John turns off his locator chip. He has a quota of personal time, but he hasn’t turned it off in weeks. The running shoes, he had to dig for in the back of his storage room. The box with her robotics toy is on the floor by the desk terminal. Which he opens. He logs into the precinct system and opens up everything he has on DRNs, Nigel Vaughn, Rudy’s papers on Synthetic Soul, and Dorian, that he’s willing to share.

The house announces his mother before she reaches the door, and lets her in without him having to tell it to. “Honey,” she says. She looks windblown in jeans and a button-shirt, which is a trick since the weather has been calm for days.

“Mom.” He hugs her. “Make yourself at home. I was just going out for a run.”

Her eyebrows climb, high enough that her graying curls hide them. “A run? Outdoors?”

He feels his neck heat up, but nods. “I’m evolving,” he says.

“John Reginald Kennex, you have a treadmill and two other machines inside this house because you don’t like the way the humidity off the bay makes you drown in your own sweat. If you’ve evolved that much, I’ll transfer every credit off my bitcoin stick to yours, right this second.”

It’s his turn to be surprised. John was born the year before the Last Great Recession, and she’s not a fan of the banking systems. That’s not small potatoes she’s betting. Still. “I won’t be long. You forgot your toys from when you stayed over, before.”

She looks toward the box, then her gaze lifts to his displays. There’s a full-body holo of Dorian, still in the anti-static suit that carries his unit number, and headlines she can probably read from where they’re standing. “Yeah,” she says. “All right.”

When he comes back an hour later, he’s dripping in sweat and annoyed as shit when his own house makes him wait at the door before it lets him in. _Bitch_ , he thinks. He might be thinking it at the house, but he might be thinking it at his mother, who has clearly upped the security in reaction to his unspoken request for her opinion.

She’s deeply engrossed, and the data streams too fast for him to read. Does she have intake implants? Or is he slowing down that much?

He passes by without comment and takes a shower. When he comes out, all but one display is dark and she’s standing at the window, staring out across the bay. She used to have a desk there, used to do most of her work from that very location until John’s dad died. Then she started working more at the office, and when she finally decided to move, she’d given him the house.

“You’re asking me if he’s sentient,” she says.

John isn’t, really. He doesn’t know what he’s asking. “Okay.”

“Artificial Intelligence has come a long way, John. I’d say that many synthetics are legitimate life forms, these days.”

“They don’t like being called synthetic.”

She turns her head to stare. “‘They’ don’t?”

He shrugs. “Dorian doesn’t.”

“All right. Your android may be sentient, but you’re asking the wrong question. Sentience doesn’t imply personhood. If it did, we’d still have whales in the ocean and gorillas in the wild. Sentience doesn’t mean shit, if someone decides to turn him off.”

John feels his jaw clench so tight, the muscles ache. She sees it, and turns back toward the water, so he says, “They can’t turn him off as long as I’m partnered with him.”

“You hope. But if he’s sentient, he can feel trapped, right? _People_ ,” she emphasizes the word, “resent obligation.”

He sighs. Dorian’s not that human, then, because Dorian’s just happy to get to be a cop.

“What about after?” she asks. “Your watch could end on shift, like your father’s did.” That’s the problem between them, he knows, the source of all this distance that didn’t used to be there.

“If that happens, I won’t be around to worry about it.”

She watches him, and he can see deep thought in her eyes. “Nigel Vaughn really was a genius.”

John makes a scoffing noise. Vaughn wasn’t that much of a genius, not if he didn’t realize he was making bots people would reject. 

She purses her lips. It’s a subtle judgment, a lot like the way Dorian judges him. “Retirement will force you out, eventually,” she says. “Your DRN is considered obsolete in terms of his processing power today. They’ll deactivate him when you retire.”

He can’t think that far ahead. “Mom, I’m still trying to figure if right now qualifies me as crazy.”

She turns around, leans her shoulders against the plex and looks back toward his desk and the single holo of Dorian the remains on display. “He’s pretty,” she says, and smiles. “Remember when I told you they’d be pretty?”

He grimaces, nods.

“Vaughn had a mission, John,” she says, and pushes away from the window. She veers toward him to plant a kiss on his cheek, then picks up the box of robotics parts. “He wanted to improve on people. That doesn’t typically go well for people. I don’t expect it to go well for you.”

“Gee,” he says, feeling the fear coil in his gut, “thanks.” She doesn’t know how deep he’s in, or she’d be kinder about all this.

He watches her shoulders shrug as she walks to the door. “I was always the pragmatist, John. Your father was the dreamer.”

John smiles. “Yeah, he was.”

Her smile is softer, sadder, when she turns at the door. “Just remember where that landed him.”

His father is dead, killed on the job. His mother holds back, waiting for John to die the same way. All his dad had was the job, in the end. And for him, it was enough.

For John? John’s got a partner who cares as much as he does, who’s attractive, and flirtatious, and way smarter than him. Who’s an _android._

John is screwed. 

 

#

The day starts out so well. Yesterday he found an old coffee warmer in a junk store and figured out how to use it to taunt Dorian for being an android.

In the car, he sets up the gag and when Dorian asks, “What am I doing here?” John says, “You’re heatin’ my coffee!”

Dorian laughs. John is happy until Dorian sticks his finger in John’s cup while lecturing him about temperature and paying attention to details. John has seen that finger stuck in terminal ports, dragged along corpses and gunshot residue and potential drug evidence to analyze its contents, and touching far too many strangers, and he realizes he has no idea what the sanitation habits are for police DRNs. But Dorian always smells okay, like freshly cleaned upholstery.

“You know how I like my coffee.” He believes it, because Dorian’s an android. Dorian can’t _ignore_ data.

“Yes,” he says. “I, unlike you, pay attention to details—like what time it is, and what time you’re supposed to pick up your partner for shift.” He sounds annoyed, but it’s all for show. He’s playing, and John knows it.

“Oh, I pay attention to details,” John says, because he can fake human annoyance better than an android can, “like you just put your finger in my coffee.”

“If you like, I could put it somewhere else,” Dorian says. It isn’t quite the flirty voice, but John can’t think of any other way to interpret that colloquialism so he changes the subject. Dorian calls him out on some other crap.

John is saved by the dispatch report of a possible homicide.

It’s definitely homicide. The security guard’s blood has soaked his cheap desk chair and congealed on the wall behind it. Dorian tags the last of the security feed and shows John five guys who entered the lobby and three who exited a stairwell at the twenty-fifth floor before the system went dark. With the elevators locked down, John starts climbing. They don’t make four floors before an explosion shakes the building, and he follows Dorian back through a rush of panicked civilians, down to balcony over a hole where the lobby used to be. Something blew through the quick-crete, took out the floor and the server rooms and whoever might have been standing in the lobby—Harrison. One uniform’s name was Harrison. He thinks the other’s was Peck.

“Lightbomb,” Dorian says, as if John wouldn’t know. He’s seen what they can do. “The building remains structurally sound,” Dorian talks on, “but there’s damage to the third and fourth emergency exits. The southeast stairwell is also blocked.” He looks at John. “We’ll need to clear the building.”

John nods, but he knows Dorian’s thinking about clearing it of civilians. John’s thinking about clearing it of the people who set off that bomb and killed innocent people.

Maldonado calls, and it doesn’t take long for her to tell him to fall back. He argues as he climbs. Her order to clear the building doesn’t leave room for misinterpretation: “Leave. The building. Now.” He talks in static, ends with “Christmas,” and hangs up the phone.

He worries for a second that Dorian’s going to make it a problem, but Dorian says, “I just love the way you wear your insubordination like it’s a virtue.” His smile is blinding.

John figures out he got suckered, though, when they reach the fifth floor and Dorian says, “At least we can make sure the civilians evacuate safely.”

It needs to be done and John knows it. Whatever the three guys on twenty-five are doing, any number of others are unaccounted for. It would be crazy to walk right past one of them and leave themselves vulnerable from behind. Still, he frowns and says, “Next time, I’m leaving you in the car.”

Dorian comes up with a plan to use the air vents, once they reach the twenty-third floor, to get to the twenty-fifth floor unseen, and John’s feeling pretty good about the whole thing until Dorian intercepts a civilian’s call and she tells him the perps just killed a hostage.

Negotiations have begun. Paige’s phone allows him to hear the suspects’ side of things.

She is frantic about her sister, and she says one of those things some women say that he’ll never understand. “This is all my fault. She wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me.” John looks back at Dorian and rolls his eyes. Armed gunmen taking the floor isn’t her fault. It’s the armed gunmen’s fault.

He doesn’t have time for this. “Paige, can you tell me how many gunmen there are?”

He gets a number, but he’s losing her, he can tell. He tries to win her back, tells her about the time he fell through a frozen lake.

Dorian, behind him again, whispers, “Are you trying to put her to sleep?”

John glares at him as he finishes the story. “I felt like everything was gonna be okay, because I wasn’t alone,” he finishes. “Paige, you’re not alone. I’m with you. Everything is gonna be okay. You believe me?”

“I do,” she says. He’s reeled her back in.

They clear the fourteenth floor and keep climbing. “You know,” Dorian says, “everyone trips on stairs and it’s calculated to occur one in every two thousand, two hundred and twenty-two occasions.”

“That’s very interesting,” John says, hoping his tone says how much it isn’t. John knows Dorian is amusing himself, but still. They’ve got nine more floors to clear before they get to the air ducts, and his bum leg aches at the socket connection.

“You know what would be interesting, John?” Dorian asks. “If you told me that ice fishing story again—”

Gunfire shuts Dorian up, at least. It also doubles John’s heart rate. Maybe it’s the sprint up the stairs, but they find two of the gang on fifteen. John empties a clip to stop one, but all he finds is a blood trail. More rapid fire in the distance ends with two familiar, efficiently spaced police-issue thirteen-mm rounds and John almost doesn’t say, “Dorian. You okay?”

“John,” Dorian says. “Get over here.”

He does, glad to see a corpse in front of Dorian, a little unsettled to see a hole blown through Dorian’s temple.

“Floor’s clear,” Dorian says.

“You okay?” John asks and, because Dorian doesn’t seem to have noticed, adds, “You took one in the head.”

“Yeah. Ricochet.”

If Dorian can ignore it, John can too. “Whatcha got?” he asks. Dorian’s puzzling over something small in his hand.

“I’m not sure,” Dorian says, “but there’s writing on it. Start.”

“Start.”

“Start,” Dorian repeats.

John sighs. Maybe Dorian is damaged and doesn’t know it. Within a minute, that turns out to be not quite true. Lights flash in the wrong places, like low-voltage electricity short-circuiting over the bullet wound. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

“My dynamic voltage scaling has been damaged by the bullet.”

Dorian is speaking with special care, which can’t be good. “You want to say that a little less complicated?”

“I won’t be able to walk in five minutes.”

Shit.

In less than two minutes, Dorian is paralyzed and propped against a cubicle wall, but the rest of him still works. He identifies the signals of seven face-maker masks in the building while John looks for tools he can substitute for what Dorian told him was needed to make field repairs. “Tenotomy scissors” will be nail clippers. John looks for “a fine tool with a sharp point like a diamond-tip engraving pen,” spots a used cotton swab in the trash.

“All right,” he says, and kneels down. “Let’s try and fix you.” Up close, Dorian’s insides look like spaghetti with purple glue poured over them. John likes the outside better.

“How’s it look?” Dorian asks. He seems worried.

“Yeah, it’s uh, totally fine,” John lies. “You can hardly see it.”

For a machine, Dorian is weirdly obsessed with hygiene. After getting a hell of an electric shock and a brief argument about shades of color, John accidentally shuts down his robot.

He doesn’t know whether to try and fix Dorian, or leave him and go on up to the twenty-fifth floor alone, but without Dorian he also doesn’t know where the access panel to the air ducts is, or how to navigate them if he finds his way in. Now that electricity isn’t sparking across everything, maybe he can see a difference between lavender and magenta. He cuts the correct fascicle ( _tendon_ ; Dorian thinks he’s a moron), envisions this one square inch of Dorian as simple circuitry since it’s not under his tactical armor, and thinks he should lodge a complaint with the manufacturer. Maybe they fixed this exposure in later models.

Paige asks him if he’s there. He forgot about her under the dual pressures of gunfire and damaged partner. So much for not leaving her alone. “I can hear you, Paige,” he says, as if he’s been listening all along. He gets the bundle in Dorian’s head back into alignment while he humors her. There’s old chewing gum in the trash can. He picks it up, thinks, _Dorian had better appreciate this._

He tries not to think about where this gum has been as he chews. Paige wants to talk, which he hates, but understands. He lets her talk him into sharing his middle name, glad that Dorian is out. “You’d better not tell anyone, okay?” he says. “Police orders.” He pulls the softened gum out of his mouth, resists the urge to spit. “It’s Reginald. My dad was a big Elton John fan.” He should be able to get the gum to hold the fascicles in place, and get the dermal layer to hold the gum in place. He pokes at Dorian’s head, says more meaningless shit to Paige.

Dorian jerks awake and spastically sucks in air. John asks, “You okay?”

“Huh?” Paige says.

John grits his teeth. She just heard him say the sincerest thing he’s said today, and he said it to his robot.

Dorian touches his head, makes a face. John resists the urge to push his hand away. “Gross,” Dorian says. His feet move and he adds, “But good.”

John has no idea how long chewing gum will hold, but Dorian stands up when Paige says the bad guys know they’re in the building. The guy John shot who got away must have made it back to the fold, and now the stairwell is under guard.

Dorian is now committed to clearing every floor. “The more people we take out before we get to the twenty-fifth,” he says, “the fewer we’ll have to deal with when hostages are in the mix.”

“We can’t—”

“It’s your fault,” Dorian interrupts. “Before you messed with my head, I could tell where they were from the signals those face-makers were broadcasting.”

John wants to rush up anyway. “Yeah? _I_ think it’s _your_ fault,” he replies as he lets Dorian lead him onto sixteen for a quick sweep, “because _you_ let yourself get shot.”

Dorian smirks. John winces, worried the facial expressions will dislodge the gum.

They clear sixteen and seventeen. John still doesn’t know what floor the sentries are on, and he still hasn’t devised a plan to get past them. That’s when Paige loses faith. “I’m going out there,” she says. “I can’t leave Jenna alone.”

“Paige, that’s a bad idea. We’re a few floors away.” He’s been telling her they’re close for half an hour.

“I have to,” she says. “If we’re going to die, I want to be with her.” It’s hard to make out the words, her voice is so choked with emotion. “She’s my sister.”

He hopes that Dorian has a lifeline to throw here, but Dorian just looks at him. Dorian usually moves fluidly. Aesthetically. At the very least, his movements are efficient. Now they look effortful, jerky. That can’t be good.

“Paige, just stay where you are,” he says, urgent now.

“I’ll leave my phone open,” she blubbers. “You’ll be able to hear what’s going on.”

“Paige, it’s too risky. Listen to me. Just stay put. Paige. Please, just listen to me.” She doesn’t answer. “Paige. Paige, are you there? Paige!”

Dorian touches his chest and mutes the mic. “John. If you keep yelling into the phone, you’ll put her in greater danger and reveal the fact that we have an open line to them.”

John curses. “We’re skipping eighteen.”

Dorian shakes his head. “No, we’re not.”

They sweep it fast and make it to the nineteenth floor, where they hear the gunmen talk about “the other crew.” It takes a minute, but with the help of Dorian’s files, John gets it. “It’s a heist.” He’s still trying to figure out how to get up to the twenty-fifth floor and stop them when he hears a sound he hopes he doesn’t recognize. “What’s that beeping?” he asks.

The careful way Dorian says “John,” tells him he’s right. “They’ve activated a lightbomb.”

John’s gut knots up, like it does when his body knows that there’s nothing he can do but his brain rejects that knowledge outright. “They’re going to kill the hostages,” he says. He and Dorian are only four floors away, and these perps are meticulous. That lightbomb timer will have minutes on it, time for them to get away. He’d bet his life on that, and he’s about to.

Dorian says, “What are you doing?” in the nervous, _How do I stop him?_ voice.

“Sticking to the plan,” John says. “We’re going up.”

“John, they know we’re here, they’re expecting us to come up the stairs. You won’t make it to the twenty-fifth floor alive.”

He turns on Dorian by the elevators. He can’t stand here and do nothing while those people upstairs die. “You heard him. We don’t have a choice.”

Dorian stares, somber and unblinking. “ _I_ don’t have a choice.”

It’s the last thing John expected Dorian to say.

Dorian turns toward an elevator and pries the doors open. “People’s lives are in jeopardy.”

The pivot from talking Dorian into a hail Mary run up the stairs to talking Dorian into slowing down to think this through gives John whiplash. “Dorian, you’ve been shot. Your head’s full of bubble gum. You can’t do this alone.”

“I have to,” Dorian says.

John knows he means it, and that talking won’t change anything. Then John remembers that he’s the guy who wanted to rush up there in the first place, and he pivots again. “Then I’m coming with you.”

“You can’t,” Dorian says. He looks unhappy about it. “I’m designed to do this, John.” Dorian must watch a lot of entertainment or surveillance video, because the way he grips John’s elbow, brief and firm, is a fucking stereotype for the comforting goodbye. Then Dorian jumps out into two hundred feet of empty elevator shaft and grabs the steel cables.

Fine, maybe Dorian was designed to do this. But John’s father was a cop, and his grandmother was a cop. John was designed to do this, too. _Think._ He has to get past the sentries. How can he—the corpse on fifteen still has his face-maker, and John can use it to walk right in. John’s synthetic leg better damned well cooperate with him today.

It does, down seven flights and then back up thirteen. He hears the mayhem as he runs, pushing off with the synthetic leg to take three, four stairs at a time. Whoever was watching the stairwell has abandoned their post, probably in response to all the gunfire inside. John worries he wasted too much time, but once he’s on twenty-five he walks right up to the two guys who have guns pointed at Dorian’s head.

“Nice of you to show up, Greggor,” one of them says.

John is within his legal rights to end them, and he does. Probably, it shouldn’t feel so good.

Dorian is crawling to the lightbomb, so John dives for the dedicated police comm. “Maldonado!” he yells. “The hostages are secure. The whole thing is a palladium heist. Shut it off, now. They got us to block the alarm system. Turn the jammer off!”

He hears her give the order, sees every collected comm device activate. All that’s left now is the lightbomb, and Dorian pulls the igniter before the timer runs out. John gets to breathe again. Dorian didn’t make a liar out of him; the hostages, wherever they scattered, will survive. So will John.

Dorian’s eyes haven’t left his. The rush is heady.

Mop-up is a nightmare. Of the seven people who took over the building, three of the kills are John’s and the rest are Dorian’s. Dorian’s will clear without incident, John knows, because John saw the spray pattern on the walls near the ceiling, and knew exactly what Dorian had done: aimed high to distract the gunmen and draw fire away from the hostages, and picked the assholes off carefully, one by one.

John has some choice words about using less care and staying alive to pick off more assholes in the future; the image of Dorian, unmoving on the floor, with guns pointed at his damaged head, is stuck in John’s brain like the after-image of a flare.

Dorian caught more rounds than John can count. One arm is twitchy and he isn’t so steady on his legs. John can’t believe that the chewing gum held.

Android Tech arrives on scene with a dolly, so John guesses the elevators are working again. “Where are you taking Dorian?” he asks.

“Field repair,” the guy from A.T. says.  “We brought the truck.”

“Okay. I’ll be down in a minute to pick him up.”

It’s dark when John gets outside. After he signs off on his preliminary statement he looks for Dorian, who leans at the back of a vehicle, watching him while the A.T. guy pulls gum out of his head wound. John holds the gaze, wondering how dumb he’ll feel if he walks over.

A.T. won’t let Dorian go, something about having to lower the power feed on his body. The guy says, “I’ll take him to the lab.”

“Take him to the station,” John says. “I need him before he’s checked in.” John doesn’t, but he won’t let them cart Dorian away like he’s equipment.

The A.T. guy shrugs. “Whatever.”

So John follows the van and collects Dorian in the parking lot. Dorian’s steadier now, but he still has a limp. “He can’t answer any calls,” the A.T. guy says. “He’s an anchor until we clear him.”

John wants to punch the guy. He lets the urge pass and gathers up Dorian with a look.

“What are we doing, John?” Dorian asks.

John doesn’t know. “Checking in,” he lies as they head toward the bullpen.

“Rudy’s going to want to repair me immediately,” Dorian says.

“He should,” John says. “You’re beat to Hell and back.”

Dorian frowns, gets an anxious look like a scared puppy. “He’ll hover. He’ll…” Dorian sighs. “I’m not ready for that, yet.”

They round the corner and people start clapping, which is ridiculous. John’s neck heats up and Dorian looks confused.

John finds out that the man who was about to end Dorian was Gerald Layton, who had no redeeming qualities as far as John can see. John has no plans to feel remorse.

Rudy walks in pissed. It’s not a good look for him. “Chewing gum? Would you use chewing gum to fix a race car?”

John shrugs. “Yeah, if it was busted and I needed to win a race.” He’d use chewing gum to fix his own head if he could, and he needed to finish a job.

Rudy looks speechless, and John is hopeful, but no. “He’ll need extensive diagnostics,” Rudy says.

John gets it, now, gets that what Dorian doesn’t want is the fussing, the overzealous intrusion that is Rudy’s stock in trade. Dorian’s processing something, and Rudy’s—energy, or whatever—is going to mess with that.

“That can wait,” he says, brushing Rudy off. He taps Dorian’s chest with the back of his hand. It’s too warm. Something is overheating in there. “Come on,” he says, “let’s go get some noodles.”

“You are aware that I don’t eat,” Dorian says.

“Perfect,” John says. “I’m buying. Let’s roll.” In the car, Dorian treats him by turning on the car’s emergency lights. “Lights? For noodles?” he asks, and points at the roof. “How are you gonna explain that?”

“I have my ways,” Dorian says. He’s not smiling, though. John treats Dorian by driving under the speed limit.

It doesn’t take long for Dorian to start talking. “Thank you, for what you did back there.”

“Don’t mention it,” John says. He tries to lighten the mood. “Besides, no one messes with my coffee warmer.”

That raises a smile, and John thinks maybe the worst is over. But John’s smile hasn’t faded before Dorian says, “Hey John, you remember that story you told Paige? You fell through the ice as a kid. When that gun was pointed at my head, I felt something similar. And I didn’t want to die.”

John feels it, the wide-open emptiness in his chest, the certainty that he’s lost a battle with himself.

“I know it’s not the same, with me,” Dorian says, “but—”

“Hey,” John cuts him off, “dead is dead.” Because Dorian’s alive. John didn’t chase after an android because of ego. John chased after him because it wasn’t okay that Dorian was going in alone, without backup. Dorian is _alive_.

“Yeah,” Dorian says, and John hears the pondering-quiet for a second. “I suppose so.”

John has been more honest than he wanted to be, but Dorian still looks—John doesn’t know. It’s not the equilibrium that he’s used to, that he needs. “Why don’t you chuck some music on?” he asks, to distract either or both of them.

Dorian, damn him, plays Elton John and calls him Reggie. John isn’t sure what he’s being punished for. Maybe Dorian really does like to sing.

When the song is over, John offers. “I’ll take you to the lab.”

Dorian looks over. His head lolls against the seat rest. “What about the noodles?”

John waves a hand. “You know when I said you looked totally fine? That I could hardly see the damage?”

Dorian nods, jerky. “Yeah.”

“I lied then. You look like shit.”

Dorian smiles.

It’s very late. John has eaten noodles, dropped Dorian at Rudy’s lab, ignored Rudy’s lecture, gone home, gone to bed, stared at the ceiling, and finally given up. He stands by the window, celo in hand, staring sightless at the lights on the bay as the gravity of his situation sinks in.

_Less than three months. Dorian has taken dozens of bullets, come too close to five explosions, been nearly torn apart by a refurbished black-market loading bot, and lost an ear to me trying to get my memory back._

_He told me he has free will, but today he proved he doesn’t._

_Once he heard that lightbomb timer engage, he was going up to the twenty-fifth floor. Period. He said he had to do this. To do what, exactly? Throw himself on the grenade?_

_I was ready to go up the stairwell knowing that guys with big guns would rain fire down on me, though. I had to do that._

_We’re the same, him and me. It doesn’t matter much if he was made of silicon and carbon and graphite-based lubricants instead of calcium and trace minerals and water._

_Now I’ve seen it, watched him jump into an elevator shaft and shimmy up steel cables like a bot. But the synthetic isn’t relevant. Now he’s just a guy who’s in my profession, more dedicated to the job than he is to anything else, and if that’s programming, so be it. Now he’s a guy with soulful eyes, of average height, who’s smart. Smarter than me._

_I am screwed._

_Inviting him out for noodles. What the fuck is that? I should have left him at the station so Rudy could run the diagnostics, fix whatever I broke in his head and patch up all the holes that did enough damage to make him limp out to the car. His left hand was so messed up, he couldn’t grip the handle to open the door._

_But leaving him with Rudy, that would have taken away what little choice he has. It would have acknowledged that he’s police property without the right to make any decisions at all. And I knew, machine or not, that he wanted to talk._

_So I took him to the car with me, and I let him talk. Then I came home, showered off the sweat of running up and down what felt like a hundred flights of stairs and mopping up and vidding my preliminary report, and took off my leg. I put my hand on the socket, like Dorian keeps telling me to do, and just sat there feeling it. Acclimating, he says._

_Then I ordered the lights out and jerked off thinking about my robot partner._

_I’m going to develop a fetish for wrists and feet because that’s the only skin I’ve seen, and I don’t even want to think about what a police-model android does or doesn’t have._

_I am really screwed._

_Lock. Kennex, John. January 14, 2007_

#

Three days later, he introduces Dorian as his partner and that’s the case where Dorian starts calling John his friend. Now Dorian knows John’s screwed, too.

It’s only a matter of time.

<<<<>>>>   
  
---  
  
**Author's Note:**

> Almost Human was a cop show set in the future. Its deep thought involved the nature  
> of humanity, the status of intelligent beings as property, and the dangers of technology outstripping the ability of law enforcement to keep up. Michael Ealy and Karl Urban, the stars of the android/human detective partnership, only increased the show’s appeal.
> 
> Written for the Escapade 25th Anniversary fanzine (and I fully acknowledge that it requires a "part 2" to round out the story.)
> 
> Thank you so much to the people who read for me and the writers who inspired me. This is for you as well as for Escapade.


End file.
